It’s been eight months now since my 22-year-old son Stephen died. The other day I came across a scrap of something he wrote.

First, some background: During one of my “girls-and-relationships” conversations with Stephen, he told me about a beautiful young woman he met at a subway stop on the D.C. Metro. She’d been listening to her iPod and they got to talking about music. Stephen told me they had major clickage. At the time, he was a cook at Black’s restaurant in Bethesda, Maryland; she was working in an office building nearby.

As Stephen and I talked, he was lamenting that all he wanted was to have someone in his life he could love. He said he thought Metro Girl might be that person, but he didn’t know how to connect with her.

“Why not?” I asked. “Didn’t you get her digits? Her email?”

“Naw,” he replied, shaking his head sadly.

“Dude! You should have gotten her email.”

“Dad! I’m sorry. I thought I’d see her again, okay?” He was clearly annoyed with himself — and with me for pointing out his egregious strategic error. But he agreed with me and resolved that if he ever saw her again, he wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.

Six months after he died, I found something he’d scrawled on a scrap of paper, undated, with only a few cross-outs. I think it might have been a rough draft of his updated strategy in case he ever met the girl of his dreams again. It’s uniquely Stephen. I figure his plan was to carry it around and give it to her the next time they met — if ever. It’s a little fumbly-awkward, but charming, nonetheless. He wrote it as prose, but it feels poetic, so I’ve kept his words, but poeticized the format.

Here it is:

Before we had even exchanged words, you stood out,
Your beauty radiating with the essence of an angel
Whose light was a beacon to what was good.
In a cold wasteland of drifting souls,
You were a warm shot of whiskey.

It was a one in a million chance of us meeting,
And you are a woman who comes every million years,
Your warm eyes can tell no lies.
So many connections are lost in passing,
So why should this be one of them?
Perhaps we could meet again,
But I’ll make it a little easier this time….

Sincerely,
Stephen
[Here he inserted his phone number]

As far as I know, he never saw her again. So, Metro Girl, this is for you — wherever, and who ever, you are.

In Memory of Stephen John DeDakis

I’d been riding on the subway for just a few minutes when I spotted them a couple rows ahead of me: three children – a tableau of what could have been my kids twenty-five years earlier. My focus landed first on the youngest, an alert, sandy-haired boy of about two, lounging in a stroller. Not the rickety kind of stroller we put up with when our three were little. This one had all the bells and whistles — cup and snack-holders, padded dash, shock absorbers. The works.

The tot’s “big” brother fidgeted in one of the aisle-facing side seats next to the train door, scissoring his yellow boots that didn’t even come close to touching the floor. He coughed and I noticed he covered his mouth – with his sleeve. Pretty grown up, I thought, for what looked to me to be only a six year old.

Across the aisle, a dark-haired little girl of about ten kept leaning her face close to the tyke in the stroller, repeatedly planting kisses on his cheek. The little guy didn’t seem to mind – he just took it all in, his dark eyes roving back and forth between his two older sibs as our train careened through the dark tunnel, pitching, yawing, groaning, screeching.

A young pony-tailed woman stood behind the stroller – one hand gripping its push-bar, the other clutching a metal pole. In spite of being in charge of three youngsters on a speeding and crowded Metro train at the end of the morning rush, she seemed serene as she attended to each child while also fielding compliments from some of her fellow riders.

As I watched the big sister and her two little brothers, I remembered back to the days when mine were that young and wondered what would become of those three little ones. Would they be able to overcome life’s obstacles? My oldest, a daughter, is thirty now, a vivacious struggling writer; my middle boy, 28, is a musician, doing what he loves – when he can get a gig; my youngest – once a little boy in a stroller – dead, now, five months.

The train pulled into Union Station. My stop. I stood, forcing myself to put a lid on my emotional incontinence. The two older children were now sitting next to each other, quietly reading books – just like mine used to do. The boy in the stroller happily munched on a cookie, strategically slipped to him by the woman, just as he was growing bored.

“Very cute kids,” I said to the woman as I got to the door.

“Thank you,” she smiled, “but I’m just the nanny.”

“Well, you’re doing a great job.”

“Thank you.”

The doors slid open and I walked off the train and toward the escalator. The doors closed and the train began to move. I paused on the platform, hoping for one last glimpse. But I was too late. The train quickly picked up speed and, in seconds, my Metro tableau became a blur of metal and light rocketing into a tunnel – and into their future.

Case in point: What to do when a manuscript is too long (or a life is too cluttered)?

Answer: Whittle it down.

(These comments will be about writing; you decide how to apply them to your life.)

I recently got a manuscript to edit that was a whopping 141,000 words. The writer obviously had a lot to say. But, sadly, too much to say. An agent or a publisher would not be impressed.

Publishing is a business and most of us are unknowns with no track record of book sales. Some 170,000 books are published every year in the U.S. alone (more in the U.K.). That comes to about 475 books a DAY. Many (if not most) don’t earn back the money a publisher spends to produce them. Therefore, it’s highly unlikely a publisher will agree to buy a bloated manuscript because its prospects of making money are too uncertain – but the certainty it will LOSE money goes up the longer the book.

Your goal should be to trim your manuscript to about 75,000 words. This doesn’t necessarily mean that what you cut will go onto the scrap heap. This is because publishers, if they like a manuscript (and the author), will want to know if you have any more stories up your sleeve. You’ll be able to say, “Why, yes. I do!”

Remember: Publishing is a business.

My first novel “Fast Track” went through 14 major revisions. At one point, it was a 150,000-word mishmash. One publisher rejected it because it didn’t fit into an easily identifiable niche – it wasn’t literary, it wasn’t a romance, it wasn’t a mystery. He said he didn’t know how to market it.

So, I took the manuscript to the book review club that met in my neighborhood. The women in the club read the story and then let me sit in on their critique. By listening to their comments, I realized I had three subplots I could easily jettison. That was the tipping point. I whittled it down to a lean 75,000 word-mystery that netted me an agent and a publisher — and some very enthusiastic readers.

So…..whittling really can pay off. See for yourself by clicking here: Fast Track

“….all the time we are struggling with our grief and its meaning, the seeds of a new compassion are germinating in our psyches. Because we have suffered, we are tenderhearted toward others. Because our own defenses have been peeled away, we have a new perspective on what it means to be vulnerable, and we recognize how closely we are all connected to one another, in a way we become porous, transparent — people whom the light shines through. And the light, which is love illuminated, reaches those around us and perhaps they, too, become able to take the risk of loving…..We know that, while we are still sad, we are not alone, and that love, often forged out of sadness, is life’s greatest gift to us all.”

This is sort of where I am right now. When I was on the metro yesterday, I found myself watching the people jostling for position as they got on and off the train. I realized that every one of them has probably suffered some kind of loss or is dealing with some kind of pain or suffering. We’re not alone — even though we often go through life feeling as if we are.

They’re coming soon
to pick up the week’s detritus –
Corona bottles, paper plates caked
with dried tomato sauce. The usual.
I tote a bulging garbage bag down the back stairs
And heave it into a stained green bin.
The sun is only a promise in the predawn grey sky.

Sorting through the recyclables,
I shove aside soggy newspapers
And the dampened carcasses of empty envelopes
Until I retrieve a tattered receipt the taxman will need
for my son’s meager estate.

Not much time. I hear their truck groaning in the next block.
One more trip and I’ll be done.
My last cargo is rotting flowers.
A week ago (or was it two?)
when I identified his body in the morgue,
The sprays were elegant white lilies
And radiant but fragile roses
Held high on stalwart emerald stems.
Now they are fetid, flaccid, spent.
They have done their noble duty
of brightening dull days,
But their life ended too soon…like his.

My deadline’s met – the garbage guys aren’t here yet.
I trudge up the stairs, already exhausted
Yet the day’s just beginning.
Strewn along the path, I pass the fallen petals
from a dead bouquet – puddles of fuchsia tears.

A lot of my criticisms are my subjective reactions to what you’ve written. If I make a suggestion, it’s only that: a suggestion. You are totally free to accept it, reject it, or come up with something entirely different.

-go through the comments and let them ruminate

-make decisions on how you plan to rework, revise, and rewrite.

-start making your changes

-TAKE YOUR TIME. A part of you will be impatient to give birth to your masterpiece, but as all good moms know, letting nature take its course is the wiser way. If you’ve been with the project for a long time (9 months or even 9+ years), it’s only natural to want get it over with, but don’t rush the creative process.

-Once you’re done rewriting, find people who – because they love you – are willing to read the manuscript at no charge and give you their honest feedback. It probably won’t be as nitpicky as a professional editor’s, but – if it’s HONEST – it’ll help you know where the story is good and where it still needs reworking.

Writing a manuscript is like living life: We are all works in progress.

I would be honored to edit your manuscript. Click on the “contact” button on my Home Page to get in touch with me. Type “Manuscript Editing” in the subject line. Or make a comment below.

Thanks! I look forward to working with you.

The engineer would later tell a coroner’s jury that he was going 90 miles an hour (legal at the time) as we rounded a gentle curve at the tiny town of Chadwick.

From my vantage point in the darkened dome car near the front of the train, I could see the locomotive’s searchlight slice through the darkness, sweeping the tracks that stretched ahead of us. Suddenly, off to my left, I saw a car speeding toward a crossing we were approaching. The car looked like a 1949 Chevy, distinctive because of its sloped rear end. A split second later, I lost sight of the car as it went in front of the train.

I heard a bang, the train shuddered, and debris rained onto the Plexiglas dome, cracking the window I’d been peering through. I ducked, then scrambled down the narrow stairway to the dome car’s lower level where I told my dad and the conductor what I’d just witnessed.

I was nine years old.

Eventually, the train came to a stop at least a mile down the tracks. My dad got off to investigate, but I didn’t want to see the carnage, so I stayed behind, shivering in a frigid vestibule and looking out the open door as Dad made his way to the front of the train.

An ambulance silently passed by, red lights flashing, a shrouded figure stretched out in back. I would meet the ambulance driver, Bob Helms, years later at a book signing in Chadwick. Tears welled in his eyes as he told me about that night in 1959 when he helped retrieve the mangled bodies of the three people whose lives ended so suddenly and brutally.

The crash killed Eugene Kutzke, 22; his wife Ellen, 17; and her brother, Raymond Stage, 11 – all of Freeport, Illinois. Earlier in the day, they’d been in Dubuque, Iowa and were returning to Freeport in a borrowed car.

I remember being particularly troubled that a boy about my age was among the victims.

The coroner’s jury ruled the crash an accident. The car came from the West and made a sharp left turn just before the grade crossing. Several buildings on the right side of the car would have obscured the driver’s view of the tracks, which crossed the road at a slightly oblique angle. The speeding train was coming from the right. Even if the driver saw the train – which I doubt — he wouldn’t have had time to react.

After my dad returned from his foray to the front of the train, we went to the club car and sat with several other people who listened as we recounted our stories. A woman told me she lived nearby and would send me a newspaper clipping with details of the crash. Thirty-five years later, it still hadn’t arrived.

Fast forward to about 1994. I was doing a writing exercise recounting a personal experience – the one you’ve just read. As I wrote, I remembered a radio news report about a car-train collision in which an infant survived. I began wondering what if an infant had survived the crash I’d witnessed and grew up wondering about her past. That idea turned into my mystery-suspense novel “Fast Track.”

The novel isn’t about the accident. If anything, it’s an example of how a personal experience can be the seed of an idea that can blossom into something else – something redeeming.

The book begins with my 25-year-old heroine vexed because she doesn’t know what to do with her life. She discovers the body of the aunt who raised her from infancy – a victim of carbon monoxide poisoning. (This is an echo of my sister’s suicide in 1980 – but that’s another story for another time.) That trauma begins a quest to unlock secrets kept hidden for a quarter century when her parents died in a mysterious car-train collision.

The manuscript went through 14 major revisions over 10 years before I found my current agent, Barbara Casey, (the 39th agent I queried). During that process, I drew on other personal experiences to add texture to a story that includes politics, journalism, and mentoring relationships.

But it all started 50 years ago in Chadwick, Illinois. So, I suppose it’s fitting that I named my heroine Lark Chadwick.

***

John DeDakis is a Senior Copy Editor on CNN’s “The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer” and the author of the mystery-suspense novels “Fast Track” and “Bluff.”

The interview is now available as a podcast sponsored by The Depression is Real Coalition, a group dedicated to helping people who suffer from depression. Here’s the link to our conversation: http://depressionisreal.org/podcast/archive_2008_01.php. It’s program #34. I hope you’ll give it a listen.

Feel free to pass this along to anyone else in your life who you feel might be encouraged by the interview.

Thanks!

John DeDakis
CNN Senior Copy Editor
(“The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer”)
Author, “Fast Track” and “Bluff” (mystery-suspense)

Most writers are motivated to write because of things that have happened to them. And the first instinct is to write it as a non-fiction autobiography because the experiences are so vivid and personally profound. Often, well-meaning friends who’ve heard you recount portions of the story exclaim, “You should write a book!”

But they don’t realize just how hard that actually is.

One reason it’s harder than most people think is that if you’re writing non-fiction, your editor will need to know more of the facts and context of any given story than you – from your narrow and limited point of view – actually know. So, as you try to write FACTUALLY, you’ll discover that you don’t know nearly as many facts as you thought you did.

Of course you can set out to find those missing details, but, as a journalist, I can tell you that the process is time-consuming, expensive, and fraught with all kinds of difficulties. And perhaps the biggest difficulty is that if you’re writing things that are unflattering about a person, you could get sued for defamation of character. Even though what you’re writing is true, if the person’s not a public figure, you could lose a lot of money defending yourself in court.

It ain’t worth it.

Not only that, but, publishers are less likely to want to make your story into a book because you’re not well known, making it harder for them to sell the story of a nobody to the general public. Publishing is, after all, a business.

So…….?

Here’s what I suggest:

Use those personal stories as a way to inspire your imagination. Change some of the details of the events and characters so that the real people won’t recognize themselves, then build a story that still conveys the deeper “truth” you want to communicate. If you have a vivid imagination you’d be on firmer ground going in that direction. That’s because you get to “dream up” the facts, something an editor of non-fiction won’t let you get away with.

That’s how I dreamed up my first novel “Fast Track.” The book got its start because of two traumatic experiences in my life: a car/train collision I witnessed as a kid, and my sister’s suicide. But, instead of recounting what happened in the style of a just-the-facts-ma’am journalist, I made up an entirely different story – a mystery/thriller – that still highlights themes and truths surrounding sudden death and suicide. I used my imagination to create a story that would resonate with people who don’t know anything about me personally.

If you’re able to camouflage the true events that happened to you and create a compelling story that still conveys a deeper “truth,” you may be able to write not just one book, but ten, simply by using what happened to you as your creative muse.

When my mystery/suspense novel FAST TRACK was first published in hardcover in 2005, one of my male friends said in astonishment to one of our mutual female friends, “I didn’t know John was a closet woman!”

Here’s how I inscribed his book:  ”Welcome to my closet.”

My CNN colleague and cone-of-silence friend Carol Costello once told me after reading an early draft of the manuscript, “You have a very well-developed female side.” I suppose some guys might be freaked to be told that, but Carol meant it as a compliment, so I accept it even though I’m still not totally sure what she means.

Writing as a woman started when I first began toying with fiction at least 15 years ago. Someone suggested that I choose a point of view that would be different for me and a challenge.

It was only later that I realized that most people who buy books are women.   Cool.

I found that writing from the female perspective hasn’t been as tough as I thought it would be, for a number of reasons:

• I had a great relationship with my mom (a third grade school teacher, incidently) — I could talk with her about anything
• Cindy, my wife of nearly 30+ years, is one of those quality people who have a lot of substantive things to say. She’s smart, compassionate, articulate, and never boring
• My 29-year-old writer/daughter Emily is never shy about offering an opinion on just about everything (including early drafts of my manuscripts)
• I work in a newsroom surrounded by twenty-something young women who tell me stuff because I’m much more comfortable asking questions and listening than pontificating.

I asked a lot of women to read FAST TRACK before I found my agent — also a woman (Barbara Casey) — and their feedback helped me make tweaks that rendered the text authentic to the female psyche. For example, I had a line of dialogue in which Lark Chadwick, my protagonist, says, “I’ll just jump into the shower.” The women of the Princeton Lakes Book Club in Marietta, Georgia, who let me sit in and listen as they critiqued the manuscript, said, as one: “Women do NOT just ‘jump’ into the shower. We languish in it and savor the sensuality of the experience.”

Got it. Lark no longer jumps into the shower.

After FAST TRACK came out, Kris Kosach of ABC Radio wrote, “DeDakis crawls inside the mind of a twenty-something female, authentically capturing her character, curiosity and self-expression in this can’t-put-down thriller.”    Nice.

And I continue to be amazed at the numerous 5-star reviews I get on Amazon from women who don’t seem to mind that a man is writing as a woman. See for yourself: http://www.amazon.com/review/product/1595071024/ref=cm_cr_pr_link_1?%5Fencoding=UTF8&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending

And now, with the publication of BLUFF, my second novel in the Lark Chadwick mystery-suspense series, author and investigative journalist Diane Dimond had this to say:  ”Lark reminds me of me in the early days of my career….DeDakis can so accurately write from a woman’s point of view — with all the intrinsic curiosity, emotion and passion — [that it's] nothing short of astounding.”   Thanks, Diane!

Yes, there is probably still plenty of prejudice out there among people who don’t believe it’s possible for a writer to be able to bridge the gender gap, but I’ve found that emotions are universal. Women, as well as men, experience fear, joy, anger, and sadness. No one gender corners the market on having feelings, it’s just that I’ve found women express them more interestingly and articulately.

So, I’m proud to be a woman — if only on the printed page.